May 3, 2020 - "Month of May"

One of the spiritual practices that we have adopted since we have had to shelter in place during the coronavirus pandemic is to pray the Rosary on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through Zoom conferencing.  We have anticipated the recommendation of the Holy Father to pray the Rosary.  His words are a great encouragement for us to continue our practice--which we intend to do until we are able to open the church again.  Let me quote two paragraphs from the Holy Father’s Letter to the Faithful for the Month of May:
 
“The month of May is approaching, a time when the People of God express with particular intensity their love and devotion for the Blessed Virgin Mary.  It is traditional in this month to pray the Rosary at home with the family.  The restrictions of the pandemic have made us come to appreciate all the more this “family” aspect, also from a spiritual point for view.
 
“For this reason, I want to encourage everyone to rediscover the beauty of praying the Rosary at home in the month of May.  This can be done either as a group or individually; you can decide according to your own situations, making the most of both opportunities.  The key to doing this is always simplicity, and it is easy also on the internet to find good models of prayers to follow.”
 
Pope Francis believes that as we look upon the face of Christ with the heart of Mary our Mother, we will be even more united as a spiritual family.  This will help us overcome this time of trial.
 
In Pope Francis’ Letter to the Faithful for the month of May, he also includes two prayers to Our Lady that he recommends that we recite at the end of the Rosary.  He is also going to pray them in spiritual union with all of us.  Last week we began the practice of using these newly composed prayers to end the Rosary we pray on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays.  We are going to use one prayer one week and the second prayer the next week.  We will keep up this pattern until we open the church again.
 
I am going to devote the rest of this column to something I began to talk about last week.  This is a recap of the history of the establishment of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) which in time became the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.  Today I am going to focus on an early leader at the NCWC: Monsignor John A. Ryan.

Following World War One, Father John A. Ryan, a priest of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis-Saint Paul and a professor of Political Science and Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America was also asked to serve as the Director of the National Catholic Welfare Council’s Social Action Department.  He did so from 1920 until his death in 1945.  In that capacity he published pastoral letters that were deeply influenced by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On Capital and Labor”) that had been published in 1891.  Father Ryan believed that justice in the world could prevent future wars.  With this conviction he pushed in these letters for universal health care, fair wages, the abolition of child labor, as well as support of unions.  Many of the ideas he espoused influenced President Roosevelt’s New Deal.  The attempts of the National Recovery Administration to stabilize capitalism by organizing industrial output, wages, and providing some form of worker representation and collective bargaining were familiar to anyone who had read what Father Ryan had published. Archbishop John G. Murray named Father Ryan a Monsignor in 1933.   Monsignor Ryan and President Roosevelt became close both personally and politically with President Roosevelt asking him to provide the invocation at the presidential invocation in 1937.  Nicknamed “Right Reverend New Dealer” because of his closeness to F.D.R., Monsignor Ryan gave the invocation once again in 1945 shortly before both men died.  At the time of Monsignor Ryan’s death he was probably the most well-known and influential social action advocate in the Catholic Church.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John